This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

What is the best response to anti-Semitism in America?

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.

Conversations of Note

Although I believe we’re living through a period of overzealous speech policing, there are still a few questions I regard as settled, a few associated speech taboos I value, and occasional instances when I believe that a public figure has gone beyond the pale––Roseanne Barr, Ralph Northam, Rush Limbaugh––and that some sort of counterspeech is necessary and desirable.

“For most of my adult life, antisemites—with exceptions like Pat Buchanan and Mel Gibson—have lacked status in America,” Michelle Goldberg writes in her most recent column for The New York Times. “The most virulent antisemites tended to hate Jews from below, blaming them for their own failures and disappointments.” But now, she laments, “anti-Jewish bigotry, or at least tacit approval of anti-Jewish bigotry, is coming from people with serious power,” arguably including a former president.

As Goldberg put it:

There is no excuse for being shocked by anything that Donald Trump does, yet I confess to being astonished that the former president dined last week with one of the country’s most influential white supremacists, a smirking little fascist named Nick Fuentes. There’s nothing new about antisemites in Trump’s circle, but they usually try to maintain some plausible deniability, ranting about globalists and George Soros rather than the Jews.

Fuentes, by contrast, is overt. “Jews have too much power in our society,” he recently wrote on his Telegram channel. “Christians should have all the power, everyone else very little.” Fuentes was brought to Trump’s lair by Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, who was evidently serious when he threatened to go “death con 3” on the Jews last month.

Since the publication of Ye’s anti-Semitic tweet, and his subsequent suspensions from Twitter and Instagram, I’ve been pondering what the best response would have been, as someone who values the taboo against anti-Semitism but doesn’t know how best to conserve it. I sympathize with those who believe that loudly denouncing anti-Semitic comments is a moral imperative, particularly when they come from a famous person whose creative work has been celebrated for artistic excellence, which confers a measure of influence. Then again, I’d hate to render public discourse captive to the most idiotic ravings of a provocateur who thrives on attention, so I also get the impulse to ignore rather than focus on West’s words.

[Read: The gift of civil discussion]

Or consider Kyrie Irving, the Brooklyn Nets star who posted a link on social media to the anti-Semitic film Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America! As fallout began, Irving declared, “I’m not going to stand down on anything I believe in. I’m only going to get stronger because I’m not alone. I have a whole army around me.” Then the Nets suspended him, and Nike announced that it would suspend its relationship with Irving. On his Substack, the sports journalist Ethan Strauss provided additional context:

Kyrie lobbied for his peers to shut down the 2020 NBA playoff bubble and potentially squander billions for the cause of social justice. He faced some criticism over this, but then some praise for prescience after players actually did go on a wildcat strike during the bubble.

Later on, more controversially, Irving refused to get a Covid vaccine, despite New York City’s quite onerous vax mandate. He was criticized rather ruthlessly for his choice in the media. Respectable outlets didn’t ask many questions about civil liberties concerns and those who had praised Irving’s past outspokeness [sic] were all too happy to suddenly dismiss him as a whack job. But New York has since ditched its mandates and history might view Kyrie’s move more favorably. Increasingly, it’s more accepted to say that young and healthy people shouldn’t be forced to adjust their immune systems to the whims of mayoral decree.

This is prologue for yet another situation where Irving is up against a consensus that he’s being insane … I do believe he’s being insane and also that he’s not a rational actor … His opinion generation process, according to those who’ve worked with him, is scrolling through hours and hours of Instagram videos absent much discernment. Irving quite literally wasn’t convinced the world was round. This wasn’t a put-on or a troll, but a genuine opinion according [to] those who know him. I’m noting the brief history to establish why it might be difficult to move Irving off a position, crazy as that position might be, even if Nike is cutting ties with him.

A House of Strauss reader pointed out that, back in 2001, then–New York Knicks player Charlie Ward made headlines after saying Jews had blood on their hands for killing Jesus and were stubborn. Rather than suspend the player, then–NBA Commissioner David Stern issued the following statement:

Ward would have been better off not to have uttered his uninformed and ill-founded statements. But I do not wish to enhance his sense of martyrdom by penalizing him for giving them public voice. He will have to accept the reactions and judgments of fans and all fair-minded people who have been offended.

Was Stern’s course prudent because it emphasized the wrongheadedness of Ward’s statement without making a free-speech martyr of a well-known athlete who was seemingly engaged in anti-Semitism? Or was there a better way? It’s hard to know for sure, but here’s a New York Post account of what happened after Irving’s suspension ended and he returned to the NBA:

Hundreds of members of a Black Jewish Israelite group chanted “we are the real Jews” as they descended on Brooklyn’s Barclays Center during pro-Kyrie Irving marches, videos show. A massive line of followers, all donning shirts of the group “Israel United in Christ,” were captured Sunday bellowing “we’ve got some good news” and “we are the real Jews,” according to footage posted on social media, which has since gone viral.

I’m unsure as to whether that could have been avoided, or whether it matters, and if so, how much it matters. And I was interested to see Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wrestling with similar questions in a conversation with Bari Weiss, who asked the NBA’s all-time scoring leader, “What do you think is the right response to a celebrity or a star athlete who makes antisemitic statements?”

Abdul-Jabbar’s answer:

There should never be a one-size-fits-all punishment, because everything depends on what is said and the reaction from the celebrity when called out. In Irving’s case, he refused to acknowledge the damage he was causing and went on to cause more. Sometimes, celebrities might say something harmful without realizing it, but when it’s pointed out are immediately apologetic. Then, nothing should happen. We all make mistakes, and we should be supportive of those who are willing to learn. I think it would be very helpful for sports organizations to offer presentations in critical thinking to their players. Too many players either didn’t learn this in college, or didn’t attend college where they might have learned it. In the end, this might save teams a lot of money and bad publicity, because it might eliminate some of the illogical prejudice being posted.

Before expressing any more of my own opinions on this subject, I am looking forward to reading and pondering whatever thoughts all of you have to offer. Do send me an email this week.

Apple’s Rotten Update

In Quartz, Zachary M. Seward argues that Apple “hobbled a crucial tool of dissent in China weeks before widespread protests broke out.” He explains:

Anti-government protests flared in several Chinese cities and on college campuses over the weekend. But the country’s most widespread show of public dissent in decades will have to manage without a crucial communication tool, because Apple restricted its use in China earlier this month. AirDrop, the file-sharing feature on iPhones and other Apple devices, has helped protestors in many authoritarian countries evade censorship. That’s because AirDrop relies on direct connections between phones, forming a local network of devices that don’t need the internet to communicate. People can opt into receiving AirDrops from anyone else with an iPhone nearby.

That changed on Nov. 9, when Apple released a new version of its mobile operating system … Rather than listing new features, as it often does, the company simply said, “This update includes bug fixes and security updates and is recommended for all users.” Hidden in the update was a change that only applies to iPhones sold in mainland China: AirDrop can only be set to receive messages from everyone for 10 minutes, before switching off. There’s no longer a way to keep the “everyone” setting on permanently on Chinese iPhones. The change, first noticed by Chinese readers of 9to5Mac, doesn’t apply anywhere else.

You Say You Want a Revolution?

Noah Millman reflects on examples of oppressive regimes being overthrown and comes to the gloomy conclusion that liberals in Iran and China are unlikely to triumph over their respective regimes:

The more I think about it, the harder it is for me to see how the Iranian or Chinese people succeed through popular protest alone. They are not challenging regimes that are thin and weak, but ones that are thick and entrenched, and fully supported by military and paramilitary organs. If they are increasingly inward-looking, oppressive and incompetent, that is in part because they have both taken dramatic steps in recent years to purge themselves of liberal or reformist elements in favor of lock-step loyalists, which leaves less room for the kind of factional split that could give a popular revolution crucial leverage inside the regime. Nor is either country on the brink of financial collapse. Iran is already massively sanctioned and yet continues to function, which has arguably increased the regime’s hold on the country rather than weakening it. China is far too large and prosperous to strangle from without. It’s not inappropriate to describe both regimes as somewhat Brezhnevite, but it’s worth remembering that Brezhnev’s Soviet Union did not collapse from its own contradictions, but successfully crushed liberal revolts in Czechoslovakia and Poland and sent troops to Afghanistan to prop up an unpopular communist regime there.

That’s not a happy conclusion for me to come to, nor is it for anyone who loves human freedom. It’s much more pleasant to believe that these oppressive regimes, having made catastrophic errors, are now about to face their just deserts. But politics is not a morality play, and oppressive and unpopular regimes—even ones whose poor decisions are steadily eroding their nations’ power and well-being—can last for a long time if they can keep enough key centers of power on their side. So far, that’s something both countries—certainly China, but Iran as well, at least so far—have managed to do.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope that people power can triumph. But from where I sit, the most likely scenario for a successful Iranian or Chinese revolution is for either country to start a major war with an adversary that they then go on to lose, badly. That’s the kind of mistake that can shatter your army or turn it against you, and if that happens the end of a regime can come quickly. It’s also a mistake that both countries have so far been wise enough to avoid making. Given the terrible human costs of any such war, we ought to hope that they continue to avoid it, even though it makes their odious regimes’ survival more likely.

Casinos Don’t Enrich Cities

Nicole Gelinas sets forth that argument in City Journal while arguing against relying on them to solve New York City’s economic woes:

Casinos don’t have much of an economic-multiplier effect for two reasons. First, the house always wins: casinos are extractive entertainment. People who lose money gambling have less to spend at competing attractions, such as restaurants or sports stadia …

Second, casinos do not create, on balance, high-paying jobs. Nationwide, the average gambling-industry worker earns $18 in mean hourly wages, federal data show—not much above New York’s statutory minimum wage of $15. Gambling dealers earn $32,450 annually; gambling managers earn $89,190. The average private-sector worker in Las Vegas, the nation’s gambling capital, earns just $992 weekly, below the national average of $1,116 … Unlike the typical New York banker or white-collar manager, the average casino worker does not command the personal spending power to support jobs across other industries. Nor does the casino worker earn enough to be a significant source of state or city tax revenue in a highly progressive state dependent on top earners...

Thus, casinos don’t save cities economically.

[Read: The case for building more housing]

Provocations of the Week

Kathryn Mangu-Ward makes “the case for space billionaires” at Reason.

And at The Permanent Problem, Brink Lindsey muses on the state of capitalism in a world without competition from alternative systems of economic organization. His take on the matter:

Since the fall of communism 30 years ago, capitalism for the first time in its existence lacks any competition from a rival system … Virtually the entire inhabitable surface of the globe has been claimed by territorially exclusive states using the same basic forms of governance. Some two-thirds of working-age people worldwide work for money income, most as wage employees of private business enterprises. The majority of people now live in cities constructed from the same building materials and shaped by the same architectural styles. Everywhere you can find people wearing the same kinds of clothing, eating the same food, driving the same cars, watching the same movies, and obsessing about the same media celebrities. For all of its history until recently, though, capitalism had to contend with actually existing alternatives. Capitalism emerged against the backdrop of aristocratic agrarianism, the legacy system that it gradually displaced and toppled. And well before the agrarian order breathed its last, a new rival arose in the form of the socialist movement. While World War I finally toppled the old agrarian power structures, it simultaneously brought socialism to power in Russia …

Capitalism’s coexistence with rival systems afforded it opportunities, and subjected it to pressures, that enhanced its powers as an engine of social progress. When industrialization was first taking off, capitalists took advantage of the huge “reserve army of labor” in the peasantry to keep wages hovering at subsistence levels. And when industrializing economies were beset with periodic crises and slumps, the capitalist system could avoid chaos because the countryside acted as a kind of informal social welfare system, absorbing displaced workers temporarily until demand for their services recovered …

Competition with socialism forced the adoption of major institutional innovations that made it possible for the system to survive that bumpy ride intact. Specifically, the advanced capitalist economies were able to avoid socialist revolution only by absorbing significant amounts of the socialist program … Capitalism’s social-democratic makeover preserved the fundamental market order while introducing unionization to strengthen workers’ bargaining power and social insurance to soften the market’s downsides. This partial co-optation of socialism rejected the doctrine’s fundamental error (i.e., radical hostility to markets) while internalizing its key insight—that the existing rules of economic life, far from being natural and necessary, are conventions that can be altered to improve society’s overall functioning. Success often brings new difficulties in its wake, and it seems to me that capitalism’s elimination of all rivals presents a genuine problem.

Kim Kardashian and Kanye West have come to a divorce agreement, a source with knowledge of the negotiations tells CNN.

Although it may be difficult to imagine a universe in which George Clooney needs a little help charming women, that’s the case in Up in the Air, the 2009 movie in which he plays a frequent-flying HR consultant in charge of executing mass layoffs. In a Dallas hotel bar, he flirts with a comely business traveler played by Vera Farmiga, needling her over her preferred rental-car loyalty program; soon, the two are comparing mileage goals and flinging their respective stacks of bonus-rewards credit cards down next to their drinks. Eventually, Clooney seals the deal with a rare American Airlines ConciergeKey card, rendered in matte graphite among all the shiny plastic. Farmiga picks it up, complimenting its weightiness. “This is pretty fucking sexy,” she marvels. They retire to his hotel room.

During the 2000s, a metal credit card could have that effect on a person. In 2004, American Express swapped plastic for titanium in its invite-only, unlimited-spending Centurion Card, and one of the most successful credit-card marketing gambits in banking history was born—or, perhaps more accurately, was finally realized. After its plastic introduction in 1999, the Centurion Card—or the Black Card, in popular parlance—became a status symbol known far outside its rarefied clientele, largely thanks to countless namechecks in rap hits by artists including Lil Kim, Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, and Kanye West. Within just a few years, the card’s legend had grown to such mythic proportions—aided by the fact that almost no one had ever seen one in person—that it was somehow widely believed to be made of metal already.

In the time since, metal credit cards have become not only a reality, but a mundanity. Once limited to products like the Centurion that require proof of high net worth and a history of lavish spending, the cards are now available to pretty much anyone with passable credit. Even Venmo, the cash-swapping app, is enticing people to use their balance like a bank account with a metal debit card in pink or black. As a marketing play, the cards are brilliant. But they’re also an object lesson in the life cycle of the consumer status symbol. When everyone’s special, no one is.

Metal credit cards may have begun as markers of extreme wealth, but they were spawned by something far more pedestrian: consumer-loyalty programs. Frequent-flier miles are the most famous of these programs, but they’re everywhere now—hotels, clothing brands, electronics retailers, fast-food chains. They’re especially popular at the top of the glutted credit-card market, where people with good credit and a relatively high income need to be tempted to open and use new cards, even though doing so tends to be expensive and annoying. Promises of free plane tickets, iPhones, and points-accrual multipliers on dining and gas purchases can be enticing perks, but after a while, all the benefits of opening a new card can start to sound the same. Credit-card companies have tried to come up with different strategies to stand out, especially because these usual perks tend not to be part of the everyday user experience; you might cash in for a free plane ticket or an iPhone upgrade once every year or two, but those eventualities are hardly a constant reminder to pluck that card out of your wallet over all the others.

Enter metal. Many people in the credit-card industry point to 2016 as the year that metal cards went wild, thanks to the launch of the Chase Sapphire Reserve Card. The card was itself an upgrade from an existing—merely Preferred—product, and it came with a hefty $450 annual fee at the time of launch in addition to its promises of fast-accruing, easily redeemable points. The shopping public couldn’t get enough of it, according to Nick Ewen, the director of content at the travel-rewards website The Points Guy. So many people applied (Ewen among them) that Chase ran out of metal and had to mail temporary plastic cards. Ewen said that although he believed much of the card’s appeal was in the big bonus-points offer for new accounts and the company’s well-liked rewards program, the metal card wasn’t exactly unrelated to its success. “At the time, it was still enough of a novelty that when you would go and pay for something with the Chase Sapphire Reserve, you would get comments from the waiter or the cashier,” he told me. Elizabeth Crosta, a vice president of communications at American Express, told me that this is referred to in the industry as the plunk factor—a heavier card is more satisfying to plunk down on the table after dinner. It lands with more authority.

That kind of response to a card launch turned heads, Ewen said, and it didn’t take long before most issuers’ fanciest publicly available cards were metal. And then their next-fanciest. American Express, which had long kept metal cards for Centurion high rollers, began issuing less exclusive metal Platinum Cards in early 2017; in 2018, its Gold Cards also made the switch, with a limited-edition rose-gold option for early adoptees. For a long time, the credit-card industry looked at nonfunctional tweaks to the card itself—a college or sports-team logo, for example—primarily as a way to market mid-tier products to people with mediocre credit. When the Chase card became a massive hit, it was suddenly clear that affluent people, too, are delighted by the prospect of a special little card.

Unlike team-logo cards, though, metal cards aren’t meant to signal fandom or allegiance—they’re meant to signal status, and not just of the airline variety. Keeping meticulous track of points balances and bonus offers can pay real dividends when it’s time to redeem those rewards, but a card needs more than that to entice people whose hobbies don’t typically involve spreadsheets. When cleverly branded, credit cards have always made for status symbols so potent that they easily tip over into the absurd, or even parodic—the costume designer Lizzy Gardiner wore a dress made out of gold American Express cards to the 1995 Academy Awards. Lots of people are willing to shell out for things that project wealth and discernment to others. This is the principle on which the entire high-end-fashion industry is based, and metal cards are maybe most accurately described not as a financial tool, but as a luxury accessory.

In the fashion industry, the trendiest pieces—those that mark their owners most clearly as stylish and well connected—have a familiar trajectory. Eventually, a brand starts pumping out more and more of a once-rare item to capitalize on frenzied demand. Other designers riff on the things that made the design so successful in the first place. Less expensive brands and counterfeiters flood the market with knockoffs and fakes. Before you know it, the look is everywhere, and it doesn’t have much sociocultural meaning at all anymore. Those in the know are on to the next thing. Ewen said that he’s sick of metal credit cards: They’re now so ubiquitous that they’re not a reliable indicator of the most rewards-intense cards, they can’t be cut up when you get a replacement card, and carrying several of them at once can, in his experience, set off airport metal detectors. Not great for a frequent flier.

But it seems like metal cards aren’t so much falling out of favor as becoming the new normal, and credit cards, as physical objects, are likely to become more like luxury accessories, not less. Most recently, the credit industry has embraced a tactic beloved by the fashion industry: the drop, in which a small amount of limited-edition (and therefore special, if not always inherently so) items are made available to the lucky few who are able to snap them up. Earlier this year, American Express cut up one of Delta’s decommissioned Boeing 747s and used the metal to fabricate a series of cards available only to clients with the company’s highest-tier Delta rewards card, which costs $550 a year. The cards, which bore the image of the retired plane, were supposed to be available for sign-up for about seven weeks. They were gone much faster.

I write this as a proud Jew and a proud American.

Former Vice President Mike Pence said Monday that Donald Trump was "wrong" to recently have dinner with White nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and rapper Kanye West at his Florida resort and that the former president should apologize for it.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Events of the past few weeks in Russia, Brazil, and America show the global right in disarray. But these are not signs of defeat, as liberals might hope; they are the disorderly attempt by antidemocratic forces to stage a recovery.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Political hobbyism has entered the workplace. China’s zero tolerance for Xi’s COVID restrictions The future of American warfare is unfolding in Ukraine. Going to Extremes

It’s been a bad year for authoritarians around the world, and November may have been their worst month yet. The Russian invasion of Ukraine continues to disintegrate into a series of disorderly retreats. Brazil’s far-right president was turned out of office. Millions of American voters kept a collection of antidemocratic candidates away from the levers of government.

We might want to see all this as a turning of the tide; my friend, the writer Jonathan V. Last—perhaps the only person capable of more pessimism than I—said this morning that he cannot resist a feeling of hopefulness. I hate to be the voice of caution here, because I want to believe the optimists will be vindicated. And I do think a collective faith in democracy will prevail. But I worry about the danger of complacency.

Over the past week, the global right has shown signs of trying to regroup after taking a hiding everywhere from the ballot box to the battlefield. Some of it seems little more than disorganized thrashing about, such as Jair Bolsonaro’s election challenge in Brazil and Kari Lake’s refusal to concede in Arizona. Donald Trump, meanwhile, is trying out a bolder version of his 2016 and 2020 race-baiting strategies by hosting a dinner for an anti-Semite and a racist—a pathetic and vulgar event that in a better political environment would be treated as yet another disqualification for participation in our public life.

Overseas, the Russians are not giving up in Ukraine, despite reports that they might quit their occupation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. (A Ukrainian official says there are signs that the Russians are pulling out; the Russians deny it.) I think it is possible that the Russian commanders have pitched a proposal to the Kremlin that they should withdraw as a matter of necessity. It would be a smart diplomatic move and a prudent strategic choice. But Vladimir Putin has demonstrated that he is a terrible strategist, and that he has no intention of ending this war.

Nevertheless, the war is going so poorly that Putin had himself shown on Russian television meeting with the mothers of servicemen he’s sent to their death. These women were likely handpicked and carefully vetted, but it is revealing that Putin felt the need to do this kind of damage control at all. Do not be hopeful, however, that this is a softening of his position: Instead, he is making the point that the Ukrainians, the fellow Slavs he claimed he was seeking to liberate from a Nazi regime, must now be destroyed as recompense for the tears of Russian mothers. His forces are retreating, but they are not going home.

Here in the United States, Trump’s dinner at Mar-a-Lago resembled a lazy Saturday Night Live sketch. Trump was joined by Kanye West, now known as Ye, and Nick Fuentes, one of the many ambitious young grifters on the right who has figured out that performative idiocy—and, in his case, blistering racism—is a lot more fun than working a straight job.

Trump, as he typically does when his overtures to extremists ignite controversy, protested that he had no idea what he had blundered into. The whole business would be laughable were it not a fact that Trump is the de facto boss in the GOP and has long been the front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024. Having dinner with a racist agitator is not normally a clever move for an American candidate, but Trump needs new allies, so he’s testing the limits of the public’s tolerance for radical new members of his coalition. Trump doesn’t understand much about politics, so he may not have internalized what happened to Republicans in the midterms. He does, however, possess an innate awareness of where he stands with his fans, and he might realize that he’s worn out his less-extreme supporters. He needs replacements.

The attempt to replenish his base underlies not only Trump’s Early-Bird Racist Dinner but his previous embrace of the QAnon movement. If reasonably sensible people will no longer support him, he must find unreasonable reserves to make up the difference. Like Putin dragooning Russians into his army, Trump is net-fishing a new pool of weirdos and extremists to shore up his ongoing attempt to avenge his loss.

None of this is new. Trump pioneered the political game of saying outrageous things, letting the ensuing scandal burn, doubling and tripling down, and then insisting that being a jerk was an example of bravery and principle. And he got away with it every time, because millions of American voters refused—and still refuse—to hold him accountable. And that is the real danger in this authoritarian retrenchment: that once again, the voters will shrug off actions that would have shocked them even five or 10 years ago.

It is important to ask Republican leaders, including Kevin McCarthy and Trump’s many rivals for the 2024 nomination, why they remain silent. (As The Bulwark’s Amanda Carpenter quipped on Twitter, “When politicians have a perfect opportunity to attack a rival, shouldn't they, uh, take it?”)

These elected officials are quiet because they know their voters, and the tolerance of the GOP base for Trump is, for now at least, deep and resilient. But in the end, it is not the job of Mike Pence or Ron DeSantis to halt Trump’s attempted return to power. That responsibility belongs to Republican voters, who must decide whether they care if Trump is yukking it up in Florida with an anti-Semitic rapper and an odious, racist punk.

We can be relieved, for the moment, that the right is in disarray. But we should not lose sight of the fact that some of the worst people in national and global politics are reorganizing and retrenching. They will be back.

Related:  

Denouncing Trump-Fuentes is a ploy, not a principle. How to fight fascism before it’s too late Today’s News The man who killed 10 Black people in a shooting at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket last spring pleaded guilty to state charges, including murder and domestic terrorism. Mauna Loa, the world’s largest active volcano, is erupting for the first time since 1984. The crypto bank BlockFi filed for bankruptcy in the latest financial shockwave following the collapse of FTX. Dispatches The Third Rail: David French explains why he’s thankful for defamation lawsuits. Up for Debate: Readers tell Conor Friedersdorf what they’re thankful for. The Great Game: Sometimes progress is measured in ties, Franklin Foer wrote after Friday’s World Cup match between the U.S. and England.

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Evening Read (Erik Carter / The Atlantic)

Whoops, I Deleted My Life

By Thomas Chatterton Williams

When the ominous warnings started hitting my inbox a few months ago, I tried to ignore them. The emails contained none of the humor or playfulness of the early Gmail ethos. Instead, they were terse and vaguely threatening, seeming to channel the depressing spirit of financial collapse and austerity present everywhere around us. The subject line: “Your Gmail is almost out of storage.” The body, in essence: This is a shakedown—pay us a subscription fee in perpetuity, and we will continue granting you what we once promised would be free access to your own life and memories.

Read the full article

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P.S.

If you were wondering why there was an outcry about anti-Semitism on Twitter this weekend, it’s because the new Twitter CEO, Elon Musk, fired off an anti-Semitic smear yesterday. A user, Zack Bornstein, tweeted, “[K]inda weird that one dude gets to decide if like a billion of us can communicate or not.” This tweet, according to Bornstein, got a warning from Twitter that it violated their rules against targeted harassment. Many people, understandably finding this laughable, then sent out the exact same tweet, ostensibly as a kind of middle finger to Musk and Twitter.

Among them was Alexander Vindman, the retired Army officer who testified at Trump’s impeachment trial and thus gained the eternal hatred of the Trumpist right. When another Twitter user noted the flood of similar messages, Musk singled out Vindman, tweeting, “Vindman is both puppet & puppeteer. Question is who pulls his strings …?” Vindman is a decorated veteran. He is also a Jew, and Musk not only smeared him as somehow being part of an online campaign (which, one assumes, he could instantly ascertain as Twitter’s boss) but also used a classic anti-Semitic trope to do it. It was a rare achievement even for Musk, who managed to look both incompetent and racist on his own platform—and he’s only been in charge for a month.

—Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

For once, Donald Trump has a point.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, Trump had dinner with the artist and aspiring presidential candidate Kanye West. Among West’s entourage was a 24-year-old livestreamer named Nick Fuentes. Fuentes, as all the world now knows, traffics in Holocaust denial, among other provocations. West is an outspoken anti-Semite in his own right.

Some former Trump supporters have raised their voices against the meeting—This time, he’s gone too far! A few even criticized Trump by name.

Now, here’s Trump’s point, implicitly at least: Have these critics been in a coma since 2015? He’s been keeping company with extremists, bigots, and charlatans for a long time—since before he entered politics, in fact.

For that matter, keeping company with Fuentes isn’t normally a Republican deal-breaker. At least two members of the House Republican Conference, Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene, have done so; the would-be Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy has promised both of them important committee assignments in the next session.

If Trump-endorsed candidates had done better in the November midterms, if Republicans had won the Senate and were not now poised to lose another race in Georgia, if the party’s prospective 2024 money was not uniting behind Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, then excuses would be made for Trump’s latest outrage, just as excuses were made for his previous outrages. What’s really going on here is something once explained to me (in a different context) by a China-watcher: “They say that an official who has done wrong will lose power. But what really happens is that an official who loses power will be accused of doing wrong.”

[David Frum: Another flop from GOP productions]

By way of illustration, compare two Wall Street Journal articles five years apart. Here is yesterday’s editorial about the Trump-Fuentes dinner, a clear and forceful demand for personal responsibility:

Mr. Trump hasn’t admitted his mistake in hosting the men or distanced himself from the odious views of Mr. Fuentes. Instead Mr. Trump portrays himself as an innocent who was taken advantage of by Mr. West. This is also all-too-typical of Mr. Trump’s behavior as President. He usually ducked responsibility and never did manage to denounce the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, or others who have resorted to divisive racial politics, or even violence as on Jan. 6, 2021.

Stinging. Now here’s the Journal’s editorial after the racist and anti-Semitic demonstrations by “some very fine people,” as Trump called them, in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the summer of 2017—when demanding personal responsibility of Trump was to be avoided at all costs:

The focus on Mr. Trump is also a cop-out because it lets everyone duck the deeper and growing problem of identity politics on the right and left … Mr. Trump didn’t create this identity obsession even if as a candidate he did try to exploit it. He is more symptom than cause.

In 2017, Trump was necessary, and so he had to be defended. In 2022, Trump is inconvenient, and so he can be condemned.

But only Trump. There’s going to be no condemnation of Kevin McCarthy for basing his power in the House on the political circle associated with Trump’s dinner guests. McCarthy is necessary, and so he has to be defended.  

Trump was once caught on audio expressing his core philosophy of scandal management: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” He did not think through the corollary: When you cease to be a star, they stop letting you do it. For big-dollar Republicans, Trump has ceased to be a star.

Thus the same Trump who launched his political career with birtherism, who hired Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka for his White House staff, who repeatedly attacked a U.S.-born judge of Mexican ancestry, can no longer “do anything.” Not if party donors can help it.

A self-gratifying theory is swirling around Trump world that the Fuentes dinner resulted from a DeSantis-inspired dirty trick. The theory is too complicated and too implausible to render in full. The idea is that Milo Yiannopoulos, the notorious provocateur who has made his way into the Kanye West entourage, is acting, wittingly or otherwise, as a double agent for pro-DeSantis big donors—inviting Fuentes to the dinner to create a public-relations nightmare for Trump.

[David Frum: Trump’s running, and Republicans have only themselves to blame]

This all sounds more like an excuse than an explanation. But it reveals states of mind. Republicans who once submitted to Trump are now looking for exits. They have no principled objection to doing business with extremists, bigots, and charlatans. Trump used to get a pass; McCarthy now gets a pass. But if Republicans can weaponize an insincere objection for immediate political purposes, they will. As they have.

The Fuentes dinner sets up a test of strength for Trump. Through two impeachments, in 2020 and 2021, and almost two years of election denial afterward, Trump benefited from the protection of a party that thought it needed him. Now some rich and connected Republicans are deciding that maybe they do not need him, after all.

No one should assume, though, that those Republicans are right. Trump fought them before, in 2015 and 2016, and beat them. Can he beat them again? One thing is certain: If Trump does repeat that primary performance, if he can rally GOP voters in 2024 and oppose the big money, if all those Trump loyalists who took control of state party organizations in the 2010s stay loyal in the 2020s, then Trump can be sure that the condemnation by rich and connected Republicans of his dinner with Fuentes will vanish—poof! The condemnation is a ploy, not a principle.

Hanging out with Holocaust deniers is bad. But so is trying to overthrow an election by fraud and violence—and that was not a deal-breaker for this GOP. Trump’s attempt to blackmail Ukraine into fabricating anti-Biden disinformation was bad—and that was not a deal-breaker. Trump’s invitation to Russia to help in the 2016 election, his real-estate business with Putin while running for president, his blurting valuable secrets to the Russian foreign minister—all were bad, but none broke the deal.

If the deal is in danger now, it’s not because Trump got worse. He’s the same. His party is the same. Only the political calculations have possibly changed. If it turns out those calculations haven’t changed, have no doubt: The deal will be on again.

Trump’s dinner with Nick Fuentes and Kanye West last week drew condemnation from only a few Republicans, with most avoiding the topic.

Just one week after formally announcing his 2024 White House bid, former President Donald Trump dined at Mar-a-Lago with Kanye West, who recently made headlines for spouting antisemitic conspiracy theories, and Nick Fuentes, a White supremacist and Holocaust denier. And to be blunt, the only surprising part of this is that Trump is now trying to distance himself from Fuentes by saying he didn't previously know the far-right activist or invite him to the dinner.

Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R-AK) joins CNN's Dana Bash to discuss former President Donald Trump hosting White nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and rapper Kanye West at his Mar-a-Lago estate, demonstrating his continued willingness to associate with figures who have well-publicized antisemitic views as he embarks on another White House run.